ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s thoughts about science, as about everything else, are complex and involved. They are also quite readily intelligible.1 But they cannot be understood unless certain preconceptions about Nietzsche are discarded or put on hold. He is, for instance, widely believed to be an irrationalist. But in fact he only rejects a certain conception of rationality, a Kantian conception, and on grounds which Nietzsche, perhaps not unreasonably, regards as rational. Any attempt to reject rationality as such would have struck him as absurd, and worse. Nietzsche is also widely thought to be a relativist of an extreme and especially pernicious sort. But, again, it is only a particular conception of realism that he rejects, and for reasons that he certainly does not regard as relative. If one persists, however, in mistaking Nietzsche for an irrationalist and a relativist then it is all too easy to get him wrong on science as well. He is not, if one reads him at all carefully, opposed to science (although he is opposed to scientism). But the metaphysically realist conception of science that he singles out for attack is sufficiently popular for opposition to it to be mistaken for opposition to science as such. The truth, as I will try to show, is that Nietzsche is committed to a positive, rational conception of scientific enquiry, and to the rigorous standards of objectivity that it presupposes.2 This may make him a less excitingly offbeat figure than he is sometimes taken to be. But it has the compensation, I think, of getting him right; and it also makes him, in a sense having nothing to do with eccentricity, more interesting.
